Publications

The association of air pollution with multiple adverse health outcomes is becoming well established, but its negative economic impact is less well appreciated. It is important to elucidate this impact for the states of India.

To inform actions at the district level under the National Nutrition Mission (NNM), we assessed the prevalence trends of child growth failure (CGF) indicators for all districts in India and inequality between districts within the states.

Mental disorders are among the leading causes of non-fatal disease burden in India. In this report, we describe the prevalence and disease burden of each mental disorder for the states of India, from 1990 to 2017.

Air pollution is a major planetary health risk, with India estimated to have some of the worst levels globally. To inform action at subnational levels in India, we estimated the exposure to air pollution and its impact on deaths, disease burden, and life expectancy in every state of India in 2017.

A systematic understanding of suicide mortality trends over time at the subnational level for India’s 1.3 billion people, 18% of the global population, is not readily available. Thus, we aimed to report time trends of suicide deaths, and the heterogeneity in its distribution between the states of India from 1990 to 2016. India’s proportional contribution to global suicide deaths is high and increasing. The suicide death rate in India is higher than expected for its Socio-demographic Index level, especially for women, with substantial variations in the magnitude and men-to-women ratio between the states. India must develop a suicide prevention strategy that takes into account these variations in order to address this major public health problem.

The burden of diabetes is increasing rapidly in India, but a systematic understanding of its distribution and time trends is not available for every state of India. We present a comprehensive analysis of the time trends and heterogeneity in the distribution of diabetes burden across all states of India between 1990 and 2016. The increase in health loss from diabetes since 1990 in India is the highest among major non-communicable diseases.

With almost one-fifth of the world’s population living in India, the health status and the drivers of health loss are expected to vary between different parts of the country and between the states. Accordingly, effective efforts to improve population health in each state require systematic knowledge of the local health status and trends. While state-level trends for some important health indicators have been available in India, a comprehensive assessment of the diseases causing the most premature deaths and disability in each state, the risk factors responsible for this burden, and their time trends have not been available in a single standardised framework. Based on intense work over two years, this report describes the distribution and trends of diseases and risk factors for every state of India from 1990 to 2016.